I am the co founder of and researcher at the quantitative long term strategy organization Convergence (see here for our growing list of publications). Over the last fourteen years I have worked with MIRI, CFAR, EA Global, and Founders Fund, and done work in EA strategy, fundraising, networking, teaching, cognitive enhancement, and AI safety research. I have a MS degree in computer science and BS degrees in computer science, mathematics, and physics.
JustinShovelain
Karma: 539
I agree that it may plausibly be argued that the difference should rarely fall into the small margin: U(good name) - U(bad name) (up to varying priors, utility functions, …). However, should people calculate to the point that they can resolve differences of that order of magnitude? A fast and dirty heuristic may be the way to go practically speaking; the difference in utility would be less than the utility lost in calculating it.
define: A theory’s “truthfulness” as how much probability mass it has after appropriate selection of prior and applications of Bayes’ theorem. It works as a good measure for a theory’s “usefulness” as long as resource limitations and psychological side effects aren’t important.
define: A theory’s “usefulness” as a function of resources needed to calculate its predictions to a certain degree of accuracy, the “truthfulness” of the theory itself, and side effects. Squinting at it, I get something roughly like: usefulness(truthfulness, resources, side effects) = truthfulness * accuracy(resources) + messiness(side effects)
So I define “usefulness” as a function and “truthfulness” as its limiting value as side effects go to 0 and resources go to infinity. Notice how I shaped the definition of “usefulness” to avoid mention of context specific utilities; I purposefully avoided making it domain specific or talking about what the theory is trying to predict. I did this to maintain generality.
(Note: For now I’m polishing over the issue of how to deal with abstracting over concrete hypotheses and integrating the properties of this abstraction with the definitions)
From pwno: “Aren’t true theories defined by how useful they are in some application?”
My definition of “usefulness” was built with the express purpose of relating the truth of theories to how useful they are and is very much a context specific temporary definition (hence “define:”). If I had tried to deal with it directly I would have had something uselessly messy and incomplete, or I could have used a true but also uninformative expectation approach and hid all of the complexity. Instead, I experimented and tried to force the concepts to unify in some way. To do so I stretched the definition of usefulness pretty much to the breaking point and omitted any direct relation to utility functions. I found it a useful thought to think and hope you do as well even if you take issue with my use of the name “usefulness”.
Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled ‘wrong’.
-- Raymond Smullyan
In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.
-- Edward de Bono
Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.
-- Edward de Bono
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-- Albert Einstein
I do not agree with all interpretations of the quote but primed by:
That’s not right. It’s not even wrong. —Wolfgang Pauli
I interpreted it charitably with “critical” loosely implying “worth thinking about” in contrast to vague ideas that are not even wrong. Furthermore, from thefreedictionary.com definition of critical, “1. Inclined to judge severely and find fault.”, vague statements may be considered useless and so judged severely but much of the time they are also slippery in that they must be broken down into precise disjoint “meaning sets” where faults can be found. So vague ideas cannot necessarily be criticized directly in the fault finding sense. (Wide concepts that have useful delimitations in contrast to arbitrary ill-formed vague ones can be useful and are a powerful tool in generalization. In informal contexts these two meanings of vague overlap).
Causes of disagreements
Minneapolis Meetup: Survey of interest
Some things I use to test mental ability as well as train it are: BrainWorkshop (A free dualNback program), Cognitivefun.net (A site with assorted tests and profiles including everything from reaction time, to subitizing, to visual backward digit span), Posit Science’s jewel diver demo (a multi-object tracking test), and Lumosity.com (brainshift, memory matrix, speed match, top chimp. All of these tests can be found for free on the internet).
Subjectively the regular use of these tests has increased my metacognitive and self monitoring ability. Anyone have other suggestions? How about tests one can do without the aid of external devices?
In complement to determining whether one’s brain isn’t in its best state there is the question of how to improve or fix it. Keeping with the general spirit of this thread, what are some strategies people use to improve their cognitive functioning (as it pertains to low level properties such as short term memory) in the short term without the use of external aids? A few I use are priming emotional state with posture, expression, and words, doing mental arithmetic, memorizing arbitrary information, and doing the above mental tests.
Intuitive supergoal uncertainty
Addressing your reification point:
By means of reification something that was previously implicit, unexpressed and possibly unexpressible is explicitly formulated and made available to conceptual (logical or computational) manipulation.”—Reification(computer science) from wikipedia.
I don’t think I did abuse vocabulary outside of possibly generalizing meanings in straightforward ways and taking words and meanings common in one topic and using them in a context where they are rather uncommon (e.g. computer science to philosophy). I rely on context to refine and imbue words with meaning instead of focusing on dictionary definitions (to me all sentences take the form of puzzles and words are the pieces; I’ve written more words in proofs than in all other contexts combined). I will try to pay more attention to context invariant meanings in the future. Thanks for the criticism.
I think he meant that even if we are not religious, society tends to pull us into moral realism even though of course moral realism is an illusion.
You are correct, though I don’t go as far as calling moral realism an illusion because of unknown unknowns (though I would be very surprised to find it isn’t illusionary).
Hmm, darn. When I write I do have a tendency to see what ideas I meant to describe instead of seeing my actual exposition; I don’t like grammar checking my writing until I’ve had some time to forget details, I read right over my errors unless I pay special attention.
I did have a three LWers look over the article before I sent it and got the general criticism that it was a bit obscure and dense but understandable and interesting. I was probably too ambitious in trying to include everything within one post though, length vs clarity tradeoff.
To address your points:
Have you not felt or encountered people who have the opinion that our life goals may be uncertain, something to have opinions about, and are valid targets for argument? Also, is not uncertainty of our most fundamental goals something we must consider and evaluate (explicitly or implicitly) in order to verify that an artificial intelligence is provably Friendly?
Elaborating on the second statement, when I used “naturalistically” I wished to invoke the idea that the exploration I was doing was similar to classifying animals before we had taxonomies, we look around with our senses (or imagination and inference in this case) and see what we observe and lay no claim to systematic search or analysis. In this context I did a kind of imagination limited shallow search process without trying to systematically relate the concepts (combinatorial explosion and I’m not yet sure how to condense and analyze supergoal uncertainty).
As to the third point, what I did in this article is allocate a name “supergoal uncertainty”, roughly described it in the first paragraph and hopefully brought up the intuition, and then subsequently considered various definitions of “supergoal uncertainty” following from this intuition.
In retrospect, I probably errored on the clarity versus writing time trade-off and was perhaps biased in trying to get this uncomfortable writing task (I’m not a natural writer) off my plate so I can do other things.
I’ll be there.
What keeps the AI from immediately changing itself to only care about the people’s current utility function? That’s a change with very high expected utility defined in terms of their current utility function and one with little tendency to change their current utility function.
Will you believe that a simple hack will work with lower confidence next time?
Why are you more concerned about something with unlimited ability to self reflect making a calculation error than about the above being a calculation error? The AI could implement the above if the calculation implicit in it is correct.
Is this whole bias caused by the exposure effect? Would there be any obstacle in unifying the two? Do people also prefer to live in towns that are associated with their parents’ names? Do people who fall for this effect also name their pets or children after themselves to a greater extent?